July 14, 2010

A new study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleague Alexandria Radford is a real eye-opener in revealing just what sorts of students highly competitive colleges want -- or don't want -- on their campuses and how they structure their admissions policies to get the kind of "diversity" they seek. The Espenshade/Radford study draws from a new data set, the National Study of College Experience (NSCE), which was gathered from eight highly competitive public and private colleges and universities (entering freshmen SAT scores: 1360). Data was collected on over 245,000 applicants from three separate application years, and over 9,000 enrolled students filled out extensive questionnaires....

The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student's chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database. To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550. ...

Espenshade and Radford also take up very thoroughly the question of "class based preferences" and what they find clearly shows a general disregard for improving the admission chances of poor and otherwise disadvantaged whites. Other studies, including a 2005 analysis of nineteen highly selective public and private universities by William Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene Tobin, in their 2003 book, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, found very little if any advantage in the admissions process accorded to whites from economically or educationally disadvantaged families compared to whites from wealthier or better educated homes. ...

At the private institutions in their study whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well. The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers. When equally matched for background factors (including SAT scores and high school GPAs), the better-off whites were more than three times as likely to be accepted as the poorest whites (.28 vs. .08 admissions probability).

Although grading standards might be lower at a working class white high school than at St. Poshington's.

Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant's admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account. Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.
When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low.
Poor Non-White Students: "Counting Twice"
The enormous disadvantage incurred by lower-class whites in comparison to non-whites and wealthier whites is partially explained by Espenshade and Radford as a result of the fact that, except for the very wealthiest institutions like Harvard and Princeton, private colleges and universities are reluctant to admit students who cannot afford their high tuitions. And since they have a limited amount of money to give out for scholarship aid, they reserve this money to lure those who can be counted in their enrollment statistics as diversity-enhancing "racial minorities." Poor whites are apparently given little weight as enhancers of campus diversity, while poor non-whites count twice in the diversity tally, once as racial minorities and a second time as socio-economically deprived....

There are problems, however, with this explanation. ...

Besides the bias against lower-class whites, the private colleges in the Espenshade/Radford study seem to display what might be called an urban/Blue State bias against rural and Red State occupations and values. This is most clearly shown in a little remarked statistic in the study's treatment of the admissions advantage of participation in various high school extra-curricular activities. In the competitive private schools surveyed participation in many types of extra-curricular activities -- including community service activities, performing arts activities, and "cultural diversity" activities -- conferred a substantial improvement in an applicant's chances of admission. The admissions advantage was usually greatest for those who held leadership positions or who received awards or honors associated with their activities. No surprise here -- every student applying to competitive colleges knows about the importance of extracurriculars.

But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call "career-oriented activities" was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."

Espenshade and Radford don't have much of an explanation for this find, which seems to place the private colleges even more at variance with their stated commitment to broadly based campus diversity. In his Bakke ruling Lewis Powell was impressed by the argument Harvard College offered defending the educational value of a demographically diverse student body: "A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer." The Espenshade/Radford study suggests that those farm boys from Idaho would do well to stay out of their local 4-H clubs or FFA organizations -- or if they do join, they had better not list their membership on their college application forms. This is especially true if they were officers in any of these organizations.

Most admissions people are unimpressive, although I recently met the top guy at one famous private college and he was formidable. In response to an anxious parent's question whether they should send their kid to dig ditches for poor people in Guatemala this summer, he replied that there were plenty of ditches that could be dug in Los Angeles County, and that poor people in Guatemala are probably pretty good at digging ditches already, so he just rolls his eyes when he sees this kind of thing on a college application, but, apparently, other colleges don't have the same reaction.

A lot of admissions people seem to have Be Like Me motivations -- one reward of their pretty crummy job is that they get to pick out young people they like and make them happy. And they tend to like people who remind them of themselves. One job of the top guy, like the one I met, is to gently remind the lower level admissions people that the last kind of people the Alumni Drive of 2030 wants to send out fundraising letters to is poorly paid admissions officers, so the admissions officers had better hold their noses and let in some competitive smart preppie jock Republicans who will go to Wall Street and make a lot of money and give some of it to the college.

"At the private institutions in their study whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well. The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers. When equally matched for background factors (including SAT scores and high school GPAs), the better-off whites were more than three times as likely to be accepted as the poorest whites (.28 vs. .08 admissions probability)."

I wonder how this relates to the ethnic imbalance among "white" students at elite colleges.

"black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550"

Its difficult for me to imagine the Hispanics and Asians are happy about the above, and will not want to do something about it in the future politically.

That "High-IQ" university idea I had doesn't sound so bad now does it? People who score 1100 on the SAT are unlikely to have what it takes to have gotten in that school. Left-leaning admissons "officers" couldn't discriminate against smart farm boys who were in the FFA, but still scored 1500 on their SATs at that school either. A prospective employer would know what he was getting in terms of raw, computational brainpower when he hired someone from such a place.

Making students do silly things like "dig ditches in Guatemala" to get by snooty, hateful, resentful, usually liberal admissions "officers" (what a damned joke that is, tacking on a quasi-authoritarian-term to their job title so that they feel more regally judicial in their position) just wastes these kids' time in high school when they could be working on the next big advancement out there, or getting interested in their true life calling, rather than wasting their time doing useless chores like building housing for single moms and their bastard offspring in a program like Habitat-for-Humanity(which is what we are being hectored to do at my job right now, as they are looking for "volunteers", which gives you brownie points on your evaluations).

I just had a look at the Yale College application. The racial section is optional. What happens if you don't fill it out? I wonder what assumptions they make. Actually the application is the "Common Application," which appears to be used by at least Harvard and Princeton as well.

4-H is a USDA (federal govt.) program, and part of USDA's mission is explicitly to end world hunger, so it's a bit bizarre for blue-stater snobs to discriminate against 4-H leadership in high school. That study suggests to me USDA needs to hype themselves and their mission better to college admission committees.

As for ROTC, colleges may negatively discriminate, but I think business schools positively discriminate in favor of former military officers. So, it may not be right, but that Midwest kid who has to take his ROTC scholarship to Ohio State has a good crack at Harvard Business school 10 years later. Just watch out for those IED's.

Frankly, I think schools like Harvard are global brands (Harvard may be THE global university) and so should care less about borderline American talent, White, Black, or Latino, and should care more about global elite talent.

Harvard needs more of the kids going to Oxford, University of Hong Kong, Technion, University of Tokyo, SNU, and IIT Mumbai -not more competition for their bottom quarter with the legacy kids whose parents underwrite Harvard's performance premium.

Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant's admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account.

This actually makes sense and has been noticed many times before. Elites pushing their civilization-destroying agenda all the same trying to insulate themselves from the results.

A million dollars question remains: why are they doing it??? An answer frequently offered in conservative circles basically boils down to a Jewish world-wide conspiracy. Sounds a little too far-fetched to be true to me. Then there is "common human folly" explanation with its many variations, from Spengler and Gumilyov to Glyn-Jones and Buchanan. Anything else?

Thanks. Your post relates to a great essay Caitlin Flanagan wrote some time ago. Quotes from about halfway through, emphasis added:

Applicants ought to consider seriously is that it's a great big PC world out there in Ivy-admissions land, and they can either get hip or go to State... In evaluating students' extracurricular activities Toor [a Duke admissions officer] is "personally most turned off by Junior Statesmen of America and by kids who started investment clubs at their schools." Pity the poor kid stuck out there in Louisville or Grand Rapids: he knows no better. Get a clue, kid! Dump the Statesmen! Join the Gay/Straight Student Alliance. Enroll in a women's-studies class—I don't care if you have to take two buses to get there. In fact, get to know the people on the bus and become incensed about their oppression (but not so incensed that you liberate the housekeeper while Mom's tied up in moot court).

The goal here is to raise your consciousness enough to attract the attention of an admissions officer at an elite college, but not so much that you find the very idea of an elite college objectionable. It's a fine line. As a PC naif, you might assume, for example, that it is constructive and worthwhile to read books reflective of cultures different from your own and to try to learn and grow from this experience. Not so fast! Toor is characteristically dismissive of white kids who are drawn to "novels of nonidentity" and write "gee-whiz essays about 'Native Son,' 'Invisible Man,' or any of a number of Toni Morrison books." Better to pick something by a dead white guy and explain what it taught you about the patriarchy. Try smacking the Hemingway piñata. Be creative. You might also enter into a brief, awareness-raising romance with someone of either a different race or the same sex or—Hello, New Haven!—both. Today's applicant to the elite colleges enters a game in which the opportunity for committing a faux pas is just as great as it was fifty years ago, only now the faux pas is on the order of joining the Junior Statesmen of America rather than of sporting ill-fitting khakis. The Junior Statesmen strike an infelicitous note in the elite-college admissions office in part because they are presumably not keenly sensitized to the tyranny of the patriarchy, but even more so because the very name is redolent of the kind of middle-middle-class earnestness that the elite colleges have always shunned.

If you don't fill out the optional racial section, they will not give you any points.

Admissions people are feminine. For the top schools, show you have balls: don't talk abou FFA, talk about your summers as crew on a "Dangerous Occupations" Alaska fishing boat, or how you kayaked down Hell's Canyon, or how you spent a year in a cabin in Montana, or how you thew chains on a rig in the gulf of Mexico, or how you trained bulls for the ring in Guadalahara, or raced sprint cars in rural Texas, or were a cowboy, or spent a summer as a salvage diver on the Mississippi, or were a midnight repo man in Detroit.

Guys, having intimate experience with some Ivy League admissions babes in my time, I can assure you they get enough applications from pasty-faced uber-smart Jewish guys and gals from the Guyland. After a while they all look and sound the same. If you give them an application that is utterly selfish (well, ALMOST utterly selfish) but is filled with High Concept Male stuff: hiked across the country from coast to coast, fought off bears, had to hide out from a Mexican drug gang, whatever, the ladies will positively ooze when they read your rap.

I am a white dude, and I can tell you that the Ivy League would never have been interested in me right out of high school. But after 5 years of High Concept Male activities, I went to a great state school, aced the courses, and (with my HCM rap) was a shoo-in for the top ten law schools

The only kid I know from North Dakota who went to an Ivy League college in the last couple of years was a very bright and motivated boy from one of the Indian reservations. He took advantage of summer programs for minorities at the college, took special classes in the summer to boost his test scores and knowledge and joined organizations. He's half Indian and half Hispanic and was head of one of the local "Get Out the Vote for Obama" campaigns. His going away to the Ivy League was unusual enough that the paper did a story on him. I actually think being from North Dakota gives them somewhat of an advantage if they do want to go because they do take geographical diversity into account. Granted, I have no idea how many FFA leaders they take. Most of the bright kids in this area seem to go to state universities or to private colleges in the tri-state area. Most of them seem to do well enough.

Is this an admission that, in later life, these are the people to whom the begging bowl will be passed? Of course it is. Which leads me to ask...

Has anyone looked at the demographics of alumni donors. Who pays? Just how well do all those black/hispanic/jewish alumni turn out their pockets, relative to their net worth, compared to rich white guys?

Publically funded education is, of course, a net transfer of wealth from white taxpayers to others. Is the same process going on in private universities?

Why do you assume that? In previous iSteve columns, you have derided the "Yale or Jail" fallacy. But with regard to college-bound young white people from Middle America, you seem to assume that it's go to Blue U. or go to Hell, or maybe Alabama or Mississippi.

That's the same sales pitch and fallacy that those old-fashioned Lefty universities are trying to sell and perpetuate.

Why is that? How do you know that the American E-leets and supposed E-leet locations of the 20th cnetury will remain the same in the 21st century?

WRT HopeAnon -- that sounds like a very feminine take, i.e. Harvard should discriminate against "icky" Red State White guys who lack "Big" Social approval/status/power.

That's what its all about. And yes, Alpha/Beta DO explain what a gay, feminized society awash in money, status and power of the great upper classes is like.

The Ivies are like "Selling New York" on Home and Garden TV (nicknamed "Home and Gay") -- no masculine presence allowed in an uber-catty female dominated social scene.

Of course, the flip side is that Harvard, Yale, and the rest of the Ivies are extraordinarily tempting targets for destruction and raiding when a populist wave gets swept into power and looks for money and goodies.

Suppose its a brutal double-dip recession, and whoever replaces Obama in whatever form (House or Senate Majority leader, what have you) looks for money to give to middle class Americans.

Why not the Ivies? Why not simply "nationalize" their endowments, and indeed their Universities, letting EVERYONE in so that they lose all meaning? Call it a reverse GM.

"A million dollars question remains: why are they doing it??? An answer frequently offered in conservative circles basically boils down to a Jewish world-wide conspiracy. Sounds a little too far-fetched to be true to me. Then there is "common human folly" explanation with its many variations, from Spengler and Gumilyov to Glyn-Jones and Buchanan. Anything else?"

Because they want to be with people like themselves. It's really quite simple. They hate white proles.

That said, given the value of a Harvard degree, a little consciousness-raising is in order, nicht war? It's not like we don't need farmers.

Whiskey,Call it feminine of me, but I do consider relative quantitative incompetence icky. Those Universalist Unitarian kids in Greenwich, Cambridge, and the UWS are more likely to be quantitatively competent than Red Stater Lutherans and Southern Baptists. In expanding the quant talent at Harvard, I'd rather see the cream of Brahmins and Hans be competed for against UHK and IITM than see the bottom quarter percentages be shuffled to allow more Red Staters white guys admitted. I see seats at Harvard for raw talent and for the kids of superrich parents to induce donations and influence connections (I'll concede the system seems slightly superior to strict merit-based state elite schools). I don't see seats for relative dummies of various underperforming populations.

"Like that liar and fraud woman who was Dean of Admissions at MIT for 10 years and who'd worked there for nearly 30 years?"

That must be what the film "Stealing Harvard" was about.

Come to think of it, wasn't there a film about a hip and diverse group of young people who conspire to cheat their way into an Ivy because, as we all know, it's all so culturally biased against women and minorities? Seriously.

i have to ask, what's with the obsession with admissions and demographics at the ivy's?

there are so many good universities now, i just don't think it matters that much anymore who is going where. a good student with talent got discriminated out of harvard? in 2010 he can simply go get nearly the same education at the state school for half the price.

unless you are the kind of suburban white male who lives and dies by what university some random black football player elects to "attend". then i suppose it matters greatly to you which bastion of higher learning a particular person chooses.

there are so many good universities now, i just don't think it matters that much anymore who is going where. a good student with talent got discriminated out of harvard? in 2010 he can simply go get nearly the same education at the state school for half the price.

Go ahead and try to get a truly elite job without going to a top ten school. The Boston Consulting Groups and Goldman Sachs of the world will not take you unless you've gone to the right university. You need those schools if you want to be a 21 yrld $160,000/year high roller with good chances of making seven figures by late twenties, and having the kind of life that all this entails.

At the private institutions in their study whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well.

Yesterday I read a post on Ticker Guy about the ROI of going to college. I have a several postgrad degrees myself which I completed whilst being fully employed. So my ROI in that sense should be optimal. However I cannot really detect much of an increase in income on account of these degrees, though there are some indirect status benefits. So I tend to agree with the Ticker Guy that most degrees have lousy returns. If so, why would poor white kids go to college when it probably pays them better to learn a trade and start a business?

In fact, if you look at the representation of Ivy League big-wigs, in significant achievements in math, science, and technology, its a total failure against even Iowa Farmboys. Two bicycle mechanics actually created an airplane while Smithsonian professors failed, miserably. Indeed, the very requirements of farming (fixing things and understanding how they work to fix them) is likely to create more competent understanding of science and math. Even if women find farming "icky" because its not filled with fabulous shoes.

Your attitude again is very, very feminine. There's nothing wrong with that in fashion, fabulous gay shoes, ice dancing, and stuff like that. It's pretty messed up when you base science and technology decisions on sniffy feminine prejudices against those not born to the "correct" aristocracy.

Women love their nobility, their princes, kings, and so on. They'd have busted up the Kitty Hawk flyer because the Wright brothers were not from the correct family, of "noble birth." I get it -- women want their men sorted out, forever, frozen in amber, no flux or changes causing difficult bets on who to have sex with. It doesn't make for competitive science and technology however.

You know what this reminds me of? Britain. Here the elite private boarding schools are amusingly called "public schools" and kids from those schools are overwhelmingly favoured by Oxford and Cambridge. I gather in the US similar schools are called "Prep schools" and favoured by Harvard, Yale etc.I think the university you go to is not so crucial for objectively-assessed specialities like Science, Math and Engineering, but it really is crucial in the "humanities" and for careers that depend on contacts. Look at the UK government: nearly all Oxbridge grads. You may have heard of the Guardian, the leading UK liberal newspaper: written and edited entirely by Oxbridge grads. And most of the bankers who destroyed our economy and got away with it? Yes, them again. And they all send their kids to "public" schools, of course.I must admit it's rather disappointing that the US is just the same.

A. What's the big deal about the Ivies anyway? Go to a state school for free with a good ACT/SAT and then become a doctor, preferably specializing. Flagship state schools offer wonderful educations (despite that the resident comment snobs seem to sneer at it on some latent level). You can end up making 200,000 to 500,000 eventually. And no offense, but no one commenting here is going to be among the true elites anyway (I doubt anyone is either old money or in possession of a 150-160something IQ), so might as well be realistic. What's the big deal about being "elite." One summer home not enough for some people out there?

B. I agree with whoever said the obnoxious beta/alpha dichotomy is being inserted into this thread. Juvenile yet entertaining assessments of sexual dynamics cannot be applied to every single facet of life. Its not going to make a different on your college application especially.

The effect of this is to prevent upward mobility of white Protestants into the leadership class, leaing us with folks like George Bush. Allother ethnic groups get their brightest onto the upward track.

I always wonder what most half-Asian/half-white kids check on the race box for college admission. Being one myself, I remember checking white because it had been in the news that Asians in California had complained that UC Berkeley was discriminating against them. Given the stats in this article, it should be a no-brainer for any half-Asian kid - you check white. I guess it would be harder to do if you have an Asian surname. But most of them are from white male/asian female couplings, so the surname usually will be European (Asian adoptees are at an advantage as well). In that case, the only way the admissions staff would know is if they requested a photo. Back when I was applying, some did but most didn't. Not sure what affect a photo would have - maybe the admissions staff would apply the "one drop" rule, or dock the applicant for being deceptive.

Oh, and Filipinos are at an advantage because many of them have Hispanic surnames, and some of them could even pass for Hispanic in appearance. I wonder if it is common in CA for Filipinos to try to pass themselves off as Hispanic.

"Most admissions people are unimpressive": at Oxford and Cambridge admissions is done by the Dons i.e. the academics themselves. Since they will have to teach the young things, they opt for bright enthusiasts. No other consideration comes close.

Oh, you're referring to white men with high SATs who come from the wrong families. (And to Asians.)

Dummies from various underperforming populations:

1. - Beethoven. White. Seventh son of a drunk and a washerwoman.

2. - Edison. White. Evaluated as "retarded" in grade school, worked as a telegraph boy.

3. - Practically everyone who invented anything: from the air conditioning you're enjoying...to the computer you're reading this on...to the political system that kept you and your relatives from being turned into mulch.

Actually, the examples are innumerable.

But such people don't come from the right side of the tracks, they don't have "quant" skills (but of course THEY DO), so you can't be bothered with them. Only homosexuals, Jews, and snobs - and yes, NAMs - need apply.

Benjamin Franklin (another white trash upstart) was asked for the result of the Constitutional Convention. He answered: "A nation - if you can keep it." Seeing your attitude, Hopefully Anonymous, we know why it wasn't kept.

"The Office of Civil Rights needs to get a call. Discrimination at colleges is illegal if they participate in federal financial aid programs."

If Obama flunkies at DOJ won't prosecute billy club wielding Negroes intimidating elderly White voters at the polls, what do you suppose the odds are that they will intercede on the behalf of poor white college applicants with 1370 SAT scores who are treated unfairly by Harvard and Yale?

I'm struck by the number of reviewer blurbs put up by Amazon about Epenshade's book (6). Not one bothers to mention which vulnerable demographic gets the dirty end of the stick.

The word "inequity" has replaced the word "injustice" in the Progressive lexicon. Funny thing, that.

"Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges "

Pat Buchanan addressed this problem at elite schools several years ago. When you factor in athletic scholarships, legacy admissions (daddy gave big bucks to dear old PU), nepotism (daddy or mommy is a faculty member), you end up with a student body disproportionately Jewish and NAM. His solution was tongue-in-cheek: quotas for white Christians in proportion to their percentage in the population.

Even if women find farming "icky" because its not filled with fabulous shoes.----What a bunch of crap. I grew up in Farmville, and FFA and or/4-H is at least half girls. My sister raised two chickens and a pig through 4-H and her best friend raised a sheep. When is this crackpot going to stop blaming everything on women just because he can't get laid by the HB10s he thinks he's entitled to?

@headache Read that same piece on Ticker Guy. Great piece. I believe that this piece refers to the "elite" lower class white folks who have the IQ and academic background to get into the Ivies, but don't because of who they are and what they represent (unless you're the one "super" candidate from WY, ND or SD, etc.).

Example: UT's Petroleum Engineering program is the best in the nation, the recognized experts in deep water drilling. Obama picked fifth-raters from Harvard to do the consulting to the Government on how to fix the Deepwater Horizon blow out in the Gulf.

As Government dominates everything, the Ivies will displace the recognized experts: Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, UT, Stanford, Harvey Mudd, Cal Tech in fields due to "brand names" and Ivy alums in Government. Picking the winners.

i have to ask, what's with the obsession with admissions and demographics at the ivy's?

there are so many good universities now, i just don't think it matters that much anymore who is going where. a good student with talent got discriminated out of harvard? in 2010 he can simply go get nearly the same education at the state school for half the price.

Mere education has nothing to do with it. The people from the Ivies go on to run the country, so it matters if they have a "No Conservatives Allowed" policy.

HopeAnon is not arguing that Harvard et al should reject white farmers b/c they're icky and maintain some kind of social standing requirement (the Boston Brahmins Whiskey's deranged brain has seized upon). He/She is saying instead that Harvard should just flat-out troll for raw brain power, from all over the globe.

Implicit (at least to me) is the idea that the AA non-qualified entrants who now squeeze in due to race should fall by the wayside, as well as any white - be they a smart, poor Red State FFA officer or a dumb rich white legacy kid - who can't meet the IQ or testing requirements.

That "High-IQ" university idea I had doesn't sound so bad now does it? People who score 1100 on the SAT are unlikely to have what it takes to have gotten in that school. Left-leaning admissons "officers" couldn't discriminate against smart farm boys who were in the FFA, but still scored 1500 on their SATs at that school either. A prospective employer would know what he was getting in terms of raw, computational brainpower when he hired someone from such a place.

The idea seems to be widespread in HBD-land that employers crave such things as "raw, computational brainpower"!

I hate to break this to y'all, but employers are quite as committed to this diversity nonsense as is the government-educational complex. In the last big affirmative-action case decided by the Supreme Court, corporate America petitioned the Court to keep "diversity" in the nations colleges.

The prospective employers mentioned above prize a college-educated workforce with the maximum possible "diversity" much more than they do mere intelligence.

A lot of HBD-ers are vaguely libertarian - perhaps this explains the near total blindness where the business class is concerned.

I agree with whoever said the obnoxious beta/alpha dichotomy is being inserted into this thread. Juvenile yet entertaining assessments of sexual dynamics cannot be applied to every single facet of life.

Whiskey stopped being entertaining years ago, when it became obvious that he is pathologically incapable of writing anything but the same damn post over and over again, regardless of the topic supposedly under discussion.

You're not American. Why do you feel the need to tell Harvard how to bolster its "brand" (leaving aside for the moment that flooding Harvard with ESL Asian math nerds would in fact be one of the fastest ways to tank its prestige -- so I might actually be on board with that)? How do you win by others' gaining status for attending a particular college in America? How does pimping for Indians and Chinese enhance your persistence odds?

Hopefully Anonymous said . . .Those Universalist Unitarian kids in Greenwich, Cambridge, and the UWS are more likely to be quantitatively competent than Red Stater Lutherans and Southern Baptists.

Paraphrasing Wolfgang Pauli, this is so far from right it's not even wrong.

The ivies are about training people to take their places in America's elite. Quantitative competence has dick-all to do with this: it's orthogonal, unrelated, a non-consideration. Smart is somewhat important, but quantitative competence?

But, as irrelevant to anything at all as HA's factual claim is, it is also false. Who, exactly, do you think all those engineers who founded silicon valley were? Unitarians from Boston? What are the (white) students at engineering and natural science departments like? Are they like JFK Jr? W? Paris Hilton? Or are they the children of midwestern plumbers and auto mechanics?

Re. snobbery, Ivy League, etc.: why the non-snobby Yankee Congregationalists of Grinnell, Iowa started the semiconductor revolution, and why the snobby Yankees of the East totally missed it.

Tom Wolfe, "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce"http://www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/content/noyce.html

"Not having your own house didn't carry the social onus in Grinnell that it did in the East. There was no upper crust in Grinnell. There were no top people who kept the social score in such matters. Congregationalists rejected the idea of a social hierarchy as fiercely as they did the idea of a religious hierarchy."

"Corporations in the East adopted a feudal approach to organization, without even being aware of it. There were kings and lords, and there were vassals, soldiers, yeomen, and serfs, with layers of protocol and perquisites, such as the car and driver, to symbolize superiority and establish the boundary lines."

"Robert Noyce and His Congregation"http://www.forbes.com/asap/1997/0825/102_print.html

It was just a couple weeks ago that Steve's comment threads were full of folks positing pervasive need-blind admissions policies that benefited ordinary Whites and making the astonishing claim that elite colleges actually discriminated in favor of Whites!

You don't have to be a genius to realize that the discrimination against low-income "whites" could well be a proxy for discrimination between Jews and gentiles within the putative "white" category ... or that, at the least, this discrimination against low-income or rural "whites" amounts to discrimination in favor of Jews and against European Americans under a disparate impact theory.

Whites are being rejected for reasons other than "merit" -- that's the bottom line.

The idea seems to be widespread in HBD-land that employers crave such things as "raw, computational brainpower"!

I hate to break this to y'all, but employers are quite as committed to this diversity nonsense as is the government-educational complex. In the last big affirmative-action case decided by the Supreme Court, corporate America petitioned the Court to keep "diversity" in the nations colleges.

The prospective employers mentioned above prize a college-educated workforce with the maximum possible "diversity" much more than they do mere intelligence.

A lot of HBD-ers are vaguely libertarian - perhaps this explains the near total blindness where the business class is concerned.

In addition, business buys into the idea that college makes you smarter, so Harvard makes you smarter than State U because Harvard is the better school.

Remember, the people running big corporations are the SAME PEOPLE who are running government. Al Gore is on the Board of Directors of Apple.

I'm actually eliciting a reaction from a few people (which is unusual) so I'll try to respond.

1. A commenter is almost correct that I advocate Harvard reject both unqualified NAMS and low qualified Red Staters (you can add to that precious, politically correct, low qualified blue staters), and replace them with international high performing quants. That commenter is wrong in that I don't recommend Harvard get rid of rich/connected legacies and big donation types. From what I can tell, it's unmeritocratic but effective and the reason Harvard outperforms more meritocratic institutions like the IIT's.

2. My primary identity is that I aspire to be a persistence maximizing agent. I don't aspire to be suborned by an American identity (or as by a Harvard boostering or quant boostering identity for that matter). I think it optimizes our general existential persistence for Harvard resources to go to quantitatively competent problem solvers rather than various identity populations competing for Harvard's bottom quarter without even wealth or family connections to offer the quantitatively competent.

But this is a bit of a rationalization for why I'm posting on this. I should be working on my personal health and personal finance -this is a leisure activity and the less I post here on the big picture, the better.

-------------------------------[Robert Noyce] was born on December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa,[4][5] to a family with deep Midwestern roots that trace back to Mayflower passengers, Love Brewster, a founder of the town of Bridgewater, Massachusetts; Elder William Brewster, the Pilgrim colonist leader and spiritual elder of the Plymouth Colony; and William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony and the second signer and primary architect of the Mayflower Compact in Provincetown Harbor.[6][7][8]

He was also a descendant of Martha Wadsworth Brewster,[9] a notable 18th-century American poet and writer, and the Rev. Reuben Gaylord, a clergyman and a founder of Grinnell College.[10][11]

He was the third of four sons[4][5] of the Rev. Ralph Brewster Noyce.[12][13] His father was a 1915 graduate of Doane College; a 1920 graduate of Oberlin College, and a 1923 graduate of Chicago Theological Seminary. He was a Congregational clergyman and the associate superintendent of the Iowa Conference of Congregational Churches in the 1930s and 1940s.

His mother, Harriet May Norton, a 1921 graduate of Oberlin College, was the daughter of the Rev. Milton J. Norton, a Congregational clergyman, and Louise Hill. She has been described as a intelligent woman with a commanding will.[14]-----------------------------

In other words, not really the son of, say, a plumber or a mechanic, and not really devoid of a connection to coastal elites.

And this kind of brings me to another issue I wonder about in the book that this post refers to: how many whites, exactly, from the lower class are really being denied admission because of these policies that are being portrayed as pernicious?

My recollection is that the vast majority of whites who go the Ivies come from the upper quarter of the economic ladder, and that the lowest quarter contributes only a very small percentage in any case (the number 3% rings a bell). And it is my general sense that if one restricts one's attention purely to SAT scores, those numbers are pretty much replicated.

So, even granting that lower class whites are being treated unfairly, when controlling for all factors, is there really going to be any kind of important difference if that unfairness is fully corrected for? Are we talking about nothing more perhaps than an increase from 3% to 4% (which, if one is interested in more breathless numbers, can be described as a 33% increase)?

"Being one myself, I remember checking white because it had been in the news that Asians in California had complained that UC Berkeley was discriminating against them."

Many Asians or half-Asians can Westernize their appearance with a little cosmetic eyelid surgery and a dye job, especially if they have larger than average noses. Afterward, they can petition to change their name to Vlad Peterson or Petronilla Anders. That will fool admissions committees for sure.

Poor whites can get a bottle tan and change their last name to Gomez or Rivera. Or they can tease their hair, cut it short, and change their name to Eric Holder.

By the way, I tried to trim this article for length, so something that got cut out was that these 8 anonymous colleges studied aren't the 8 Ivy League colleges, they are 8 private colleges representative of the UNSWR top 50.

"Implicit (at least to me) is the idea that the AA non-qualified entrants who now squeeze in due to race should fall by the wayside, as well as any white - be they a smart, poor Red State FFA officer or a dumb rich white legacy kid - who can't meet the IQ or testing requirements."

Why are you mentioning those three groups as an example when one clearly does not belong with the other two when it comes to school admisssions?!? The point of the article is that poor whites are discriminated against when all other variables are normalized. WHAT DON'T YOU GET ABOUT THAT?!? Poor whites are discriminated against more so then any other group, so when making some other argument you don't have to make a case against them AGAIN by putting them with groups that get an advantage in the current process. Is your hatred of poor whites that deep? I bet it is. It is becoming very clear that hatred is a large part of this whole process.

"You are funny. When it comes to a 150 or 160 IQ, it takes one to know one."

Funny, perhaps. But likely statistically correct. If less than 0.25 percent of the population has an IQ that high, why should I assume that anyone commenting on this blog does? I'm sure everyone is intelligent enough though, and most intelligent people are not amongst the elite and never will be. Anyone thinking they have a shot at being amongst the "true elite" is deluding themselves just as much as an average kid in kindergarden who thinks he will be an astronaut.

Yup. Being a working-class white is like the new version of original sin.

If your daddy wasn't all that impressive, it's your fault, too.

However, not all is lost. Without any moral compunction, I recommend that working/lower class whites check the "Hispanic" box.

All Western Europeans ultimately derive from Spain, so it isn't really a lie. My half-Irish, half-Welsh grandpa told me that our ancestors originally came from Spain. Genetic tests have proven that he was correct. I have no idea how the Irish and Welsh knew this before the genetic evidence came out (he said so in the early 80s), but they most certainly did. Perhaps it's because the old Irish myths say so, and Irish, despite their frequent inebriation, tend to have a pretty impressive memory.

Claiming to be of Hispanic origin only matters for the stats the colleges keep, and therefore if one self-selects they can use you to boost numbers. What are they going to do, anyway, send you to a court to prove that your blood is impure?

I know you've said before, Steve, that whites should call themselves Anglo to benefit their group in aggregate, but if they do this they'll simply be rejected, and what benefit could that give to Anglo-Celtic whites to have their sons and daughter shut out?

Force racial testing on them if it comes to that. It is your right as a citizen to claim whatever origin you please. Claim whatever is of most benefit. I wouldn't recommend black, because that is too obvious, but as the World Cup showed one can be Hispanic and quite white at the same time.

Furthermore, as an American of mainly Celtic ancestry, I have more originally Hispanic blood than your typical Mexican. That is a fact.

This concept of "playing by the rules" is gone forever. Anyone who forces that on their children is hurting them. Really hurting them. Mexicans can come to this country illegally and be rewarded for it. Blacks are rewarded simply for their race. "Whites" have a choice, and don't have to be "white." Didn't Noel Ignatiev hail the destruction of the concept of whiteness? Well, help him along and deny that you're white.

Stop calling yourself "white." All that matters to the admissions folks is the numbers they turn over to the government. Hell, men can even call themselves women these days (all you have to do is say you feel like a woman), and in many states one can get married to whomsoever one wants regardless of sex.

Take advantage of that. I'd call myself a black woman if it helped me support my family. I'd tell my kids to check Hispanic if it helped them get into college and get scholarships. That isn't cheating -- it's how America works today.

This makes the case for affirmative action for all, at least in the Ivy League. Shouldn't our future elites reflect the ethnic and geographic diversity of the nation as a whole? Couldn't Congress make it a condition for receiving federal funds? Who will introduce the bill?

If only the exclusion of whites were limited to top colleges. Affirmative Action and pc discrimination are at work at all levels of society. Non-priveleged whites are being marginalized in every sector of society.

To do affirmative action right, Jews have to be counted as a separate race and WHITE Hispanics have to be included with other whites.

Affirmative action impacts whites who do better than blacks and browns but worse than rich whites and Jews. Since Jews count as whites and academically perform near the top, they are less affected than working class whites who do better than blacks but cannot compete with the really smart Jews and much richer whites.

All that extracuricular stuff is a distraction for people who are serious about science or engineering. And by that, I don't mean people who just want to get a degree in science or engineering as a credential, but rather people who want to make a contribution to the field. Joining lots of organizations just proves that you're a joiner. Most accomplished scientists are not joiners, at least not of the organizations favored by admissions officers. Things like that take too much time away from the obsessive focus required to understand scientific and technical topics. I've looked at enough resumes of science students to know that when they list Habitat for Humanity and Model United Nations and the like as extras, that they'll almost certainly turn out to be zeros at science.

Now you guys understand how grade inflation enables this. There is only one meritocratic top ten university -- Caltech. And there's no way Caltech can practice much AA because Caltech is also the hardest school to graduate from. Its freshman/sophomore core is notoriously difficult with proof-based math in first year calc (comparable to the hardest math section at MIT) and physics for 5 quarters for ALL students (including history and business majors). However, the very difficulty of passing Caltech has hurt Caltech in both the rankings (since a high grad rate is considered a plus) and in the alumni donation game. If all the top schools had just ONE required core course that were tough to pass, affirmative action would be half dead.

So apparently the Ivies (and also Stanford and Mit) have proven that hypocrisy, lowered standards, and double-talking admissions officers pave the road to high prestige and successful fund-raising.

I don't have ANY hatred of poor whites, having been one, and coming from a long line of farmers.

I was merely trying to clarify what I thought Hopefuly Anon was saying (as it turns out, I was incorrect), which was, essentially, that that no unqualified people - rich whites, poor whites, AA folks, etc - should get in to Harvard or any other top-tier university. Nowhere in that statement is any support for the discrimination against QUALIFIED poor whites, which I agree is happening to an alarming degree.

Is your hatred for actually making an honest effort to read and understand another's ideas, rather than just looking for key words to jump up your hobby-horse passions, that deep?

I know of one person (blonde, blue-eyed, plainly Anglo/European name) who claimed to be Native American, with no factual basis, in the 1980s and got into Yale with only an average scholastic record. So, absent a photo or 'tribe certification' requirement, etc., this does work.

I know a descendant of the Hapsburgs, with one of those last names that's all dashes and 'y's, who marked 'Hispanic' (which is of course, technically true, as others have pointed out); she applied for and got a special Hispanic-only scholarship to Harvard. This was also in the mid-80s.

"If only the exclusion of whites were limited to top colleges. Affirmative Action and pc discrimination are at work at all levels of society."

Brother, you ain't kidding. I have yet to pass a job site in California that wasn't rotten with Mexicans. A few specialized white contractors come in to do electrical, plumbing, or especially challenging heavy rigging, but the white blue collar class have been pushed out entirely.

The hidden cost of PC and hiring low IQ minorities is the diffusion of incompetence into all sectors of the economy. AS much as the Minority Mortgage meltdown, this phenomena is crippling us. The new banking reform bill is a classic example, creating new Federal bureaucracies to enforce diversity in the financial industries -- it will be why Americans begin off-shoring their retirement accounts. It's also in the Health reform bill -- which is why the first person who starts a 747 air ambulance service to India, transporting large numbers of patients trying to avoid Nick Rivera in the operating room, is gonna be a billionaire.

I wanna see "comprehensive" legislation real bad in the goddam LEGAL industry. Big law firms should be compelled to hire black and Mexican partners who get big time profit sharing: even if they can't figure out the directions on the hand dryer in the executive washroom.

Regarding the author of this study,Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade, there is a recent HBD news connection. The young woman who a few months ago scandalized Harvard Law School with her email musings about the possibility of racial IQ differences had worked on some sociology research with Professor Espenshade when she was an undergraduate student at Princeton.

All Western Europeans ultimately derive from Spain, so it isn't really a lie. My half-Irish, half-Welsh grandpa told me that our ancestors originally came from Spain. Genetic tests have proven that he was correct. I have no idea how the Irish and Welsh knew this before the genetic evidence came out (he said so in the early 80s), but they most certainly did. Perhaps it's because the old Irish myths say so, and Irish, despite their frequent inebriation, tend to have a pretty impressive memory.

I suspect your grandpa "knew" about the Iberian connection, not from some deep folk memory accurately preserving some of the genetic history of the Isles, but from the same "folk genetics" I heard from the elders - viz., that the black hair common among the Welsh and Irish came from Spanish sailors washed ashore from wrecked Armada ships. (That "impressive Irish memory" probably owes more to the fabulist's gifts than the mnemonist's.)

Excellent read. However there is one exception. The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. FFA and 4-H students as well as farm family kids are all priorities for the college so students with those experiences do well in admissions despite often being some of the least competitive in terms of academic standing. Cornell also has an ROTC program so we look to support it with applicants who express such interest.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

My Book:

"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency." - John Derbyshire Author, "Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics" Click on the image above to buy my book, a reader's guide to the new President's autobiography.